This map shows the flow of carbon emissions embodied in trade among the major exporting and importing countries. Net exporting countries are in blue and net importers in red. China is by far the largest exporter of carbon dioxide emissions. Arrows indicate direction and magnitude of flow; numbers are megatonnes. (Steven Davis/Carnegie Institution for Science)

The study finds that, per person, about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide are consumed in the U.S. but produced somewhere else. The United States is both a major importer and a major exporter of emissions embodied in trade. The net result is that the U.S. outsources about 11% of total consumption-based emissions, primarily to the developing world.

Says co-author Ken Caldeira, a researcher in the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology:

Instead of looking at carbon dioxide emissions only in terms of what is released inside our borders, we also looked at the amount of carbon dioxide released during the production of the things that we consume.

Caldeira and lead author Steven Davis, also at Carnegie, used published trade data from 2004 to create a global model of the flow of products across 57 industry sectors and 113 countries or regions. By allocating carbon emissions to particular products and sources, the researchers were able to calculate the net emissions “imported” or “exported” by specific countries.

For Europeans, the figure can exceed four tons per person. In Switzerland and several other small countries, outsourced emissions exceeded the amount of carbon dioxide emitted within national borders. Most of these emissions are outsourced to developing countries, especially China.

Davis explains:

Just like the electricity that you use in your home probably causes CO2 emissions at a coal-burning power plant somewhere else, we found that the products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan, and the United States cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China. On the flip side, nearly a quarter of the emissions produced in China are ultimately exported.

Where CO2 emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system. Effective policy must have global scope. To the extent that constraints on developing countries’ emissions are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise.

The report is published online in the March 8, 2010 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

CO2 emissions from fossil fuels fell by an estimated 6.3 percent in 2009. Emissions from coal led the drop in 2009 CO2 emissions, falling by nearly 11 percent. Declines in energy consumption in the industrial sector (a result of the weak economy) and changes in electricity generation sources are the primary reasons for the decline in CO2 emissions (U.S. Carbon Dioxide Emissions Growth Chart). Looking forward, projected improvements in the economy contribute to an expected 1.5-percent increase in CO2 emissions in 2010. Increased use of coal in the electric-power sector, and continued economic growth, combined with the expansion of travel-related petroleum consumption, lead to a 1.3-percent increase in CO2 emissions in 2011. However, even with increases in 2010 and 2011, projected CO2 emissions in 2011 are lower than annual emissions from 1999 through 2008.

The drop in emissions in 2009 was the biggest since data collection began in 1949. The Great Recession was primarily responsible, as U.S. real gross domestic product dropped 2.4% in 2009, in the biggest decline since 1946. Emissions dropped 5.8% in 2008.

It’s hard enough imagining the U.S. and other developed nations voluntarily sacrificing economic growth, much less embracing voluntary frugality. Can you even imagine China and India voluntarily giving up their ambitions to join the developed world? The entire world has joined in a suicide pact.

It’s beginning to look like the only thing that will save humans and other living things from the ravages of global warming is global economic collapse.

Climate scientists have long worried that global warming could unlock the vast quantities of the greenhouse gas methane that are frozen in the Arctic permafrost, kicking off a feedback loop that could end in catastrophe. Now, an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov has found signs that it may already be happening.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is is shallow, 50 meters (164 feet) or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth’s history. During the Earth’s coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the Earth warms and sea level rises, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.

The press release quotes Shakhova:

It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen. Nobody considered this huge area.

Top left. Bubble plumes (probably dominated by CH4) rising from the seafloor registered by geophysical instrumentation. Top right. seismic image showing gas charged sediments and gas release from the bottom. Bottom left. Positions of oceanographic stations with bathymetry lines. Bottom right. Fluxes of CH4 venting to the atmosphere over the ESAS. Source: Shakhova et al.

The study, “Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, is published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science. It shows that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

A quote from the study in article at Green Car Congress captures the scientific community’s reluctance to sound alarmist:

Although the oceanic CH₄ flux should be revised, the current estimate is not alarmingly altering the contemporary global CH₄ budget. These findings do change our view of the vulnerability of the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir on the ESAS; the permafrost “lid” is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH₄ is escaping to the atmosphere.

To discern whether this extensive CH₄ venting over the ESAS is a steadily ongoing phenomenon or signals the start of a more massive CH₄ release period, there is an urgent need for expanded multifaceted investigations into these inaccessible but climate-sensitive shelf seas north of Siberia.

In this New York Times article, Dr. Shakova reiterates the notes of scientific caution:

I would not go so far as to suggest any implications. We are at the very beginning of research.

The permafrost contains 1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon – about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere – much of which would be released as methane.  As a greenhouse gas, Methane is  is 25 times more potent than CO2 over a 100 year time horizon but 72 times as potent over 20 years. Atmospheric concentrations of methane have more than doubled since pre-industrial times.

All the work that’s been done over the past century to preserve some wild ecosystems in national parks etc, is going to be mostly subverted.  The park may still be there, but what grows in it will, in most cases, be nothing like the thing that we were originally trying to save.

As the impacts of global warming manifest themselves over the coming century, warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will result in just about every landscape in the country changing radically.

Staniford’s piece exposes the flaw in the approach environmentalists took in the 70s, the approach (taken by Oregon’s statewide planning Goal 5 , for example): identify a “significant” resource, draw a line around it, and protect it from conflicting uses. Protecting a living resource requires much more than drawing a line around it.  Rather, you have to maintain the health of the ecosystem within which it is embedded.

Within a global climate system wildly disrupted by human greenhouse gas emissions, how could we possibly expect that more local ecosystems could remain unaffected?

At Countercurrents.org, Helena Norberg-Hodge makes a compelling case that “going local” – shifting economic activity back into the hands of local businesses instead of concentrating it in fewer and fewer mega-corporations – may be the single most effective thing we can do to begin to tackle the problem.

Norberg-Hodge points to food as a clear example of the multi-layered benefits of localization.  Local food systems can help reinvigorate entire rural economies and have social and environmental benefits:

• While globalized agriculture demands monocultural production of cash crops, a food system oriented towards local and regional markets gives farmers incentives to diversify.
• Diversity creates many niches on the farm for wild plant and animal species.
• Diversified farms can get by without heavy machinery or heavy doses of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
• Most of the money spent on food goes to the farmer, not corporate middlemen.
• Small diversified farms employ more people per acre than large monocultures. Wages paid to farm workers benefit local economies and communities far more than money paid for heavy equipment and the fuel to run it: the latter is almost immediately siphoned off to equipment manufacturers and oil companies, while wages paid to workers are spent locally.
• Local food systems provide better food security.
• Small-scale, diversified farms have a higher total output per unit of land than large-scale monocultures.

Agribusiness interests dominate at the state, national, and international levels. For example, the Agribusiness Council is upfront about its aspirations for dominance of the global food system:

The Agribusiness Council (ABC) is a private, nonprofit/tax-exempt, membership organization dedicated to strengthening U.S. agro-industrial competitiveness through programs which highlight international trade and development potentials as well as broad issues which encompass several individual agribusiness sectors and require a “food systems” approach. Examples of such issues are commercialization of new technology/crops, environmental impacts, human resource development, trade and investment policy, natural resource management, and rural development.

touts its incestuous relationship with  the U.S. government:

Initiated under Federal government auspices by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, The Agribusiness Council was formed by a group of business, academic, foundation and government leaders in order to facilitate American agribusiness participation in agricultural trade and development programs with developing countries – and represent private-sector agriculture interests to Federal government decision-makers.

and makes no bones about its objectives:

As an organization with international linkages, The Agribusiness Council seeks to strengthen the U.S. agricultural sector’s international outreach through stimulating private enterprise trade and investment solutions in Third World agro-industrial development.

Agribusiness interests may be too entrenched and government too corrupt to change. But we can change. We have the power to opt out of the global food system and to begin to grow local food systems, from the ground up.

Here’s the takeaway thought. Climate change and energy scarcity – the two greatest challenges of our time, perhaps in human history – are symptoms. The problem is physical growth, continued population expansion, continued increase in material standards of living, in a world that has finite limits.

Meadows points out the probability of the problem of physical growth being addressed is 100%. What cannot be known is whether it will be addressed voluntarily or involuntarily. Collapse – meaning that material standards of living, peace, trust in the government, and other things fall, out of control – is a possibility:

The same thing with collapse. I know that the current growth in population and in material use cannot continue–absolutely, with 100% probability, that it is going to stop. When? How? How seriously? We have no scientific way to make predictions.

The longer we wait to do social measures, like birth control, or voluntary simplicity, the more likely it will be that physical measures will cause this decline.

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier this month could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers said Thursday.

Another iceberg known as B9B, which had been jammed against the Antarctic continent for more than 20 years, began to drift and smashed into the Metz tongue.

I found this satellite picture of the event at the European Space Agency website:

The 2550 square-kilometer (985 square-mile) block broke off on February 12 or 13 from the Mertz Glacier Tongue, a 160-kilometer spit of floating ice protruding into the Southern Ocean from East Antarctica due south of Melbourne. B9B is a remnant of a 2,000-square-mile iceberg that calved in 1987, making it one of the largest icebergs ever recorded in Antarctica.

The resulting new iceberg, along with B9B, have since drifted into an adjoining area called a ploynya – an area that produce dense water, super cold and rich in salt, that sinks to the bottom of the sea and drives the conveyor-belt like circulation around the globe. The Metz Glacier Polynya is particularly strong and accounts for 20 percent of the “bottom water” in the world.

Benoit Legresy, a French glaciologist who works at the Laboratory for Geophysics and Oceanographic Space Research in Toulouse and who has been monitoring the Metz glacier, explains how the icebergs could possibly disrupt ocean circulation patterns:

[I]f they stay in this area – which is likely – they could block the production of this dense water, essentially putting a lid on the polynya.

First, a history of carbon emissions. Notice emissions didn’t really start to take off until the 1950s.

Next, a closer look at emissions since 1965, broken out by major contributors.

Future Chinese emissions make doubtful any prospect of avoiding dangerous or even catastrophic global warming, whether or not the Chinese economy continues along its current growth path.

Exactly how is the world going to achieve 20% cuts (from 1990 levels) by 2020, much less 80% by 2050? Copenhagen sure doesn’t leave much room for optimism.

First, here’s Brown’s classic graph.

As domestic consumption continues to rise after oil production peaks, exports quickly decline to zero.

Now take a look at a real-world example: Great Britain.

Wikipedia has graphs of other examples of countries where oil exports are seeing accelerated declines due to rising domestic consumption: Indonesia, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico. The implications for oil importing nations are ominous as ever more oil exporting nations hit peak and begin to decline.

The Wikipedia article argues that Great Britain doesn’t fit the model because domestic consumption has remained essentially unchanged for the last 20 years rather than rising. Changing the slope of the domestic consumption line in the Export Land Model graph from rising to flat does, of course, make a difference for exports. But ultimately the results are similarly stark for exports – level domestic consumption, or even domestic consumption that declines less rapidly than domestic production, means that soon there’s no excess oil left to export. The only difference is how “soon” soon is. Despite flat domestic consumption, Great Britain has now shifted from an oil exporter to an oil importer, sucking supplies from the rest of the world rather than adding to world supplies.

Without growth, we cannot begin the process of restoring fiscal responsibility. . . . before the federal government can begin attacking soaring deficits and a massive national debt, it needs to increase jobs and ensure economic growth.

Calculated Risk points out housing (not existing home sales!) is historically the best leading indicator for the economy and unemployment, using Residential Investment (quarterly from the BEA’s GDP report), monthly data on Housing Starts and New Home sales from the Census Bureau, and builder confidence from the NAHB. How do these look?

Total starts had rebounded to 590 thousand in June, and have moved mostly sideways for eight months. Single-family starts were at 484 thousand (SAAR) in January, up 1.5% from the revised December rate, and 36% above the record low in January and February 2009 (357 thousand). Just like for total starts, single-family starts have been at about this level for eight months.

Housing starts are moving sideways . . .

The housing market index (HMI) was at 17 in February. This is an increase from 15 in January.

The record low was 8 set in January 2009. This is still very low – and this is what I’ve expected – a long period of builder depression. The HMI has been in the 15 to 19 range since May 2009.

More moving sideways . . .

New Home Sales in January were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 309 thousand. This is a record low and a sharp decrease from the 348 thousand rate in December.

And it would be generous to even call this “moving sideways”.

Automatic Earth continues:

Sheila Bair’s report on the banks is abysmal, lending in the private sector is falling off a cliff while public lending is running up that same cliff, and in that quote above Geithner just told us that there are no plans to quit adding to the debt before spending gives birth to growth in some fictional fairy tale of immaculate financial conception. But it’s beyond foolish not to ask what happens if no such fairy tale ending exists, if only simply because the risk that pervades the entire endeavor is as palpable as it is terrifying.

The taxpayer funds presently spent on the thus far evasive dream of recovery and growth resumption could be spent on programs to soften the blow of possibility number two, where growth never resumes, or doesn’t do so for many years to come. It’s one thing for everyone to want growth, it’s quite another to actually get what you wish for.

Jim Kunstler has for years been predicting that we’ll blow our last wad trying to maintain business as usual long after BAU is over for good.

Given the reality of peak energy, it’s time to begin planning for “possibility number two, where growth never resumes”.   As economic activity is dependent on energy inputs, declining energy availability means return to growth simply isn’t in the cards.

Time for Plan B.